The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level

TL;DR

This paper revisits the Cardan Grille method, proposing a simplified approach that could explain the Voynich MS's text patterns and potentially encode meaningful content, encouraging new research directions.

Contribution

It introduces a more straightforward Cardan Grille-based method and explores its implications for understanding and possibly creating the Voynich MS text.

Findings

The Voynich MS's word length distribution resembles a binomial pattern.

The proposed method can generate both meaningless and meaningful text.

The approach offers a new perspective for analyzing the Voynich MS.

Abstract

The Voynich MS is an illustrated 15th century manuscript, whose text is written in an unknown alphabet, which has not been translated until today. In 2004 Gordon Rugg published a paper in which he proposed that this text is likely to be meaningless, and could have been composed by an alternative application of a so-called Cardan Grille, namely by moving a piece of cardboard with holes over a large table of word fragments, and writing down the words that thus appear. This paper caused considerable discussion in the circles of people interested in the Voynich MS text, but it has not found many followers, even until today. The present paper takes a closer look at the mechanics of this method. Based on this, a more generic method is proposed, which is considerably simpler, both to set up and to execute. It is shown that the unusual word length distribution of the Voynich MS, which is very close to binomial, could be a consequence of the application of such a method. Furthermore, it is argued that this method could not only be used to create meaningless text, but also to encode meaningful text. A first high-level analysis looks at whether such a method could indeed have been applied to create the Voynich MS text, but this is certainly far from conclusive. The main aim of this paper is to inspire further research of the Voynich MS text into a new direction that has not yet been explored in great detail.